Automatically starting synergy in GDM in Ubuntu/Fedora

Before you follow this guide, be sure to read about the issue I had in Fedora 12 with this strategy.

At work, I have a Mac Mini as my main workstation with one monitor. There’s another monitor to the right which is connected to my Linux box. I run a synergy server on the Mac, and I run a synergy client in Linux. However, I was getting pretty frustrated when I’d have to manually start the synergy client on the Linux box with another keyboard.

After a bit of Google searching, I found a solution that will enable synergy at the GDM login as well as after the login (when the window manager starts). Here’s the process:

Open /etc/gdm/Init/Default in your editor of choice and go to the bottom of the file. Just before exit 0, add the following:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1
/usr/bin/synergyc 111.222.333.444

Next, you can create the /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default file as an empty file, or you can copy over the template file from /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default.sample to /etc/gdm/PostLogin/Default. Either way, add the following to that file:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1

Finally, edit the /etc/gdm/Presession/Default file and add in the following before exit 0:

/usr/bin/killall synergyc
sleep 1
/usr/bin/synergyc 111.222.333.444

Once that’s done, you can log out and log back in to see the changes. You can also reboot your Linux desktop or switch to runlevel 3 and back to 5 (if your OS supports runlevel changes).